Full support for the XML Paper Specification (XPS). Microsoft XPS provides
an alternative for page description and document storage but it is not compatible
with the de-facto PDF standard. ABCpdf now supports full interoperability between
Adobe PDF and Microsoft XPS. Convert your PDF documents to XPS. Convert your XPS
documents to PDF. And our conversion routines are carefully written to preserve
the natural structure of your source documents wherever possible. So this means
the preservation of color spaces and the preservation or conversion of embedded
fonts.

Full support for the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Microsoft
WPF is the new graphics sub-system developed for .NET 3.0. It comes in both the
standard flavor seen on platforms like Windows Vista and also in a lightweight
web based system - Silverlight. Of course with a new graphics API drawing to screen
a new PDF export facility is needed too. As such ABCpdf now comes with full WPF
import capability. See our WPFTable example project for details and examples.

Enhanced
Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) support. Our EPS import and export engines have
been wonderfully popular. However they abstracted certain elements like fonts
and color spaces so that the transition from EPS to PDF might not always be as
literal as one might like. For the current release we've completely re-written
the EPS import engine to provide a direct translation between EPS and PDF wherever
possible. This means that text in your EPS file will end up as text in your PDF
document. It means that unusual color spaces in your source EPS files will end
up as the same color spaces in your PDF document. At the same time as enhancing
EPS import we also enhanced EPS export which now supports multiple color spaces
for use with different types of printer. So you can render directly to Grayscale,
RGB or CMYK EPS.

Read any document. We've leveraged the power of XPS to
allow us to import any document direct into ABCpdf. This means that you can use
hundreds of different applications to cope with hundreds of different document
formats. So you can now read your Microsoft Office document formats like Word,
Excel and PowerPoint either using OpenOffice.org or using Microsoft Office and
you can read your HTML documents using ABCpdf or Internet Explorer. Please note
that not all applications like being scripted this way and not all support the
standard print commands.

Native support for Flash. Yes we wrote our own
SWF rendering engine! That means that those lovely smooth graphs you see in Flash
stay smooth and resolution independent when you import them into a PDF. And while
we were about it we wrote our own Flash export engine so you can convert your
PDF documents to native vector Flash.

HTML import has been updated to use
our new native Flash import engine. So Flash content in your PDF will appear in
your PDF in true vector format. We've made numerous minor changes to our HTML
import routines to mesh more closely with current versions of Windows and produce
an even more perfect result. And if inconsistencies are detected we try and fix
them automatically rather than failing.

What happened to ABCpdf ASP? Well
for this version we implemented a new COM layer over the native .NET base - a
layer which exactly mimics the interface of ABCpdf ASP. This means you can use
one product for your .NET deployment and also for any legacy COM deployment. Think
of it as double value - ABCpdf .NET and ABCpdf ASP both in one package. Plus you
get the advantages of the .NET architecture behind a COM front end - advantages
like native x64 support and features like SVG import.

ABCpdf now generates
smaller documents in less time. Our new refactoring code eliminates all fat from
your PDF documents. Plus a variety of optimizations both in specific and in general
areas have produced great results. Generic architectural changes have realized
speed gains of 5-10% across the board. Specific optimizations in areas like remapping
and appending have realized speed gains of more than 400%.

PDF rendering
has been enhanced and optimized. ABCpdf supports complex structures like Type
4 functions both faster and more accurately. Memory usage for patterns and similar
objects has been reduced.

New document-as-image and image-as-document functionality.
For some people a TIFF is an image. For some it may be a multi-page fax document
format. We now allow you to treat documents as images and images as documents.
Everything just behaves that little bit more logically. On a practical everyday
level this means that the XImage object now accepts file types like PDF and DOC
for drawing into PDF documents.

With the explosion of import functionality
we have implemented a new ReadOptions class for full control over the process.
This allows you to set normally hidden properties like timeouts, the module to
be used for importing a particular file type or to control the way in which specific
applications like OpenOffice.org handle complex features such as eForms. For example
you might choose to import Microsoft Word documents using OpenOffice.org to specify
a form submission method for embedded forms and a resampling resolution for embedded
images.

ABCpdf now supports incremental update. Incremental update preserves
document structure by appending changes onto an existing document. This means
you can step back through the changes made each time it was saved. Plus it allows
you to append a sequence of signatures to a document.

ABCpdf now has better
eForm and Annotation support with enhanced rendering and generation of appearances
for a wide variety of annotations such as highlights. Plus new features like support
for comb fields, fields that separate each character with a line, and improvements
to the eForm stamp methods.

It's been a long standing aim of ours to support
clients using older versions of .NET. However this means that we've sometimes
been unable to take advantage of newer .NET features. Now ABCpdf links dynamically
into .NET 3.0 and later enabling features like WPF import and XPS export. However
if you only have .NET 2.0 ABCpdf will still work fine with these features disabled.

ABCpdf
now supports the new PDF 1.8 - Acrobat 9.0 - specification. Plus it reads and
fixes corrupt and non-standard formats of PDF generated by new updates of popular
software.